Specifically, he said that the key to the institution's ongoing
success is the exact opposite of the path it has followed over
the last decade--death by a thousand staff cuts.

The key to the Post's future success, Bezos said, is innovation
and growth.

The Post will invest in some areas, Bezos said, and cut in other
areas.

But most of all, the Post will experiment until it finds a way to
make money and grow while continuing to uphold the Post's
tradition of producing excellent journalism.

How will the Post do this?

By serving readers well enough that they want to pay for the
product.

The challenge the Internet has created for the traditional
newspaper model, Bezos observed, boils down to two key problems:

"Exclusive" news doesn't remain exclusive for
long (because if it's important and interesting,
dozens of blogs and other sites will summarize it, supplement
it, opine on it, challenge it, and/or build on it within
minutes of its being published).Unlike
some newspaper owners, Bezos didn't grumble and curse about
this. He just acknowledged it as a fact. And he suggested that
it made it difficult if not impossible to sell single stories
to readers.

The Internet has "atomized" traditional newspaper
content bundles--breaking them down into single stories and
thus making them hard to charge for.

The answer to this challenge, Bezos suggested, was not to give
all content away to all readers for free, as so many newspapers
have (boneheadedly) done for more than a decade.

Rather, Bezos suggested, the answer was to come up with a package
of content that readers want:

He repeatedly said that the success of The Post depends on its
ability to draw readers into a “daily ritual habit” of reading
across a collection of different topics — and paying for it.
“People will buy a package,” Bezos said, “they will not pay for a
story.”

This suggests, among other things, that Bezos is in favor of
readers paying for Washington Post content, either via a paywall
or some other subscription method. This will sound startlingly
old-fashioned to some digerati, who are convinced that free,
ad-supported content is the future. But it will be music to the
ears of many who work in the news business.

Of course, whether Bezos himself is in favor of readers paying
for Washington Post content isn't as important as whether he can
actually get readers to pay.

And the answer to that question will likely come down to the
attractiveness of the content "bundle" or "package" that Bezos
and the new Washington Post start selling.

What could a new Washington Post bundle look like?

Well, one obvious
answer is that full access to the Washington Post could be
included with any purchase of a Kindle. (Bezos didn't
say the bundle had to be only newspaper content--or, for that
matter, only content.)

And Amazon Prime members will almost probably get full
access to the Washington Post at some point.

Beyond that, Bezos & Co. are going to have to figure out what
parts of the Washington Post Washington Post subscribers truly
love--what they consume again and again in their "daily ritual."

Figuring this out won't take long: All Bezos will have to do is
look at the site logs for and behavior of those who are already
paying for the Washington Post and observe what kinds of content
they are consuming.

And then, presumably, Bezos will:

Invest in more content like the content that
subscribers are reading

Reduce investment in the content that subscribers don't
read or can get elsewhere

Well, duh, you might
say--that's obvious. Of course Bezos will do that.

Well, yes, it's
obvious.

But the fact is that, for
nearly 20 years, since the dawn of the commercial Internet, the
newspaper industry has largely refused to do
that.

Instead, the newspaper
industry has obstinately insisted that readers should want what
editors give them--because the editors know what is important.
And newspapers have continued to produce and sell basically the
same product (bundle) that they have always produced and sold,
regardless of whether readers wanted to buy it. Worse, for some
bizarre reason, newspapers have elected to give the whole thing
away for free!

Thankfully, Jeff Bezos does
not appear to want to do that.

Instead, Jeff Bezos appears
intent on experimenting until he figures out what bundles readers
are willing to pay for and then investing to improve those
bundles until readers are positively delighted by
them.

That's great news for the
Washington Post.

It's also great news for
Washington Post readers.

And it's also great news for
journalism, which is continuing to move through a tumultuous
transition period and--in the opinion of this observer, at
least--is
entering a new golden age.